Americans watching television on the evening of 17 March 1970, and Australians viewers tuning in on 16 February 1986, are unlikely to have paid much attention to the closing credits of two peak-time shows. In retrospect, though, they were seeing the start of two great movie-making careers.
The US network ABC had a 23-year-old called Steven Spielberg directing an episode of Marcus Welby MD; on Australia’s ABC, Jane Campion, an unknown young New Zealander, was in charge of a show called Dancing Daze. And unlike many directors who viewed the small screen merely as an audition for the the big one, both continued to keep a foot in the living room.
Spielberg has worked on the NBC series Amazing Stories (1985-87), new CBS legal series Bull and HBO’s 2001 epic Band of Brothers – he was integral to ending the view among movie-makers that television was something directors only did if they were too young, old or bad to get employed in Hollywood. Campion made the return journey with Top of the Lake (2013), her darkly brilliant New Zealand detective series, the impending second run of which is among the most anticipated entertainments of this year.
Meanwhile, A-list directors David Fincher and Baz Luhrmann made House of Cards and The Get Down respectively for Netflix, with Fincher now working for the network on an FBI-related drama called Mindhunter and Luhrmann confirming, after much speculation, a second season of his series set around the New York music scene in the 1970s.
Now the cinematic diaspora in television has welcomed what is perhaps both its biggest catch and largest disappointment: Woody Allen. The director has flirted with the medium before, using it as a sort of court of appeal in 1994 to remake for ABC Don’t Drink The Water, a 1969 film that had apparently dissatisfied him. However, his Amazon series, Crisis in Six Scenes (available for the last four days to Prime subscribers) consists of six episodes written, directed by and starring Allen and so represents one of the biggest commitments to the medium by Tinseltown aristocracy.
Or at least theoretically it does. Because, although Allen’s body of work has come to TV, his heart does not seem to have followed. Stretching a single narrative across six half-hour episodes, Allen’s show has the form of a sequential sitcom, although, unfortunately, the content of an inconsequential one.
Allen and his long-time collaborator Elaine May play Sidney and Kay Munsinger, elderly, wealthy New Yorkers in the 1960s. The couple’s occupations – he an author, she a therapist – are such stereotypes of Allen characterisation as to suggest that he hasn’t made Amazonian stretches of the imagination for his new employers, although his cinematic habit of casting starry new talent has transferred to this line of work. He’s hired Miley Cyrus as a Patti Hearst-like terrorist, a member of the Constitutional Liberation Army, to whom the Munsingers reluctantly give sanctuary.
The basic situation of respectable Americans stumbling to the other side of the legal line promisingly recalls Manhattan Murder Mystery and Bullets Over Broadway, both high spots in Allen’s erratic backlist of films. In this case, though, the plot is killed by the execution.
The director has admitted that he hasn’t watched much modern television and this omission is signalled in his default employment of lengthy conversations in interior settings: a bedroom, a kitchen, a barber’s chair. When two policemen call at the door in the second episode, the camera stays as tight on the actors as possible, recalling the grammar of old studio-based sitcoms where the director knew that there was nothing beyond the door frame except crew and cables.
It’s possible that Allen’s conceit was to make a show that resembled a lost sitcom from the 60s, but, if so, it feels like one that should have remained mislaid, as the project adopts neither of the attitudes towards TV of the period – nostalgia or satire – that might be creatively interesting. The writing is also often dismayingly lazy, especially in exposition: Kay, for instance, suddenly tells Sidney a detail of her childhood that he would surely have long known.
Crucially, the most successful sabbaticals of filmmakers in TV occur when the transplanted talent has a love of the medium and an enthusiasm for forms of storytelling that are impossible in film. Top of the Lake and The Get Down, for example, tangibly delight in the options of pacing and characterisation that the massive canvas brings. Allen, in contrast, seems to have written a two-hour movie and cut it up into half a dozen chunks.
When making Top of the Lake, Campion may have sometimes felt that she was bringing prestige to TV, but there is also a clear sense that the form is stretching her in ways that will raise her status as well. Crisis in Six Scenes looks like Allen accepting a compliment from television without bothering to return it.
